Madeleine Klett ’14, of Arlington, Va., has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Sri Lanka where she will teach English to Sri Lankan students during the 2014-15 academic year. She will also meet and interview Sri Lankan contemporary artists and artist collectives. She is interested in seeing how working artists are supported in Sri Lanka, and the opportunities that are available for them.

Klett, who has extensively studied Sri Lankan and Asian culture at Holy Cross, is a history major and studio art minor with an Asian studies concentration. She spent the fall of 2012 studying abroad at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka through the intercollegiate Sri Lanka Education program.

This year, she received the Wall Prize, which is awarded to a fourth-year history major whose essay is deemed most exemplary. The title of her essay was “The Sari and Lifestyle Dress: National Constructions of Gendered Uniform in Late Colonial Sri Lanka.” She was also awarded the Asian Studies Program Award which recognizes distinctive academic achievement in the Asian Studies curriculum and contribution to the Asian Studies Program.

Following the Fulbright, she hopes to pursue a degree in curatorial or museum studies.

At Holy Cross, Klett is a Student Programs for Urban Development intern, and a Spring Break Immersion Leader. She is also on the student advisory committee for the history department, and tutors native Vietnamese speaking adults at the South East Asian Coalition of Central Massachusetts.

Each year approximately 1,900 U.S. college students are awarded grants through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. The Fulbright Program, the U.S. government’s flagship program in international educational exchange, awards grants to U.S. citizens and nationals of other countries for a variety of educational activities, primarily university lecturing, advanced research, graduate study and teaching in elementary and secondary schools. Since the program’s inception in 1946, more than 300,000 participants — selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential — have had the opportunity to observe each other’s political, economic and cultural institutions. The program operates in more than 155 countries worldwide.